Feminist uses of the term ‘care’ actively contribute to ongoing debates about the kind of world we currently live in, as against the one we want to inhabit in the future – a contribution directed towards effecting positive change in the world. Unsurprisingly, the various ways feminists employ the term ‘care’ entail benefits and problems, as well as being the subject of intense debate. This paper aims to summarise and critically assess the main conceptual frameworks and associated debates within feminist perspectives on care. Analyses of care as labour, first- and second-generation feminist ‘ethics of care’, postmodern/poststructuralist and posthuman/new materialist uptakes and, finally, notions of ‘radical care’ are considered. In short, the paper explores the radical potential of care; specifically in feminist terms – that is, what is its potential for advancing progressive social change?
AgambenG (2021) Where are we Now? The Epidemic as Politics. Trans. Dani V. London: ERIS.
2.
AhmedS (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press/Routledge.
3.
AhmedS (2008) Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘New Materialism’. European Journal of Women’s Studies15(23): 23–39.
4.
AmrithMSahraouiN (eds) (2018) Gender, Work and Migration: Agency in Gendered Labour Settings. London and New York: Routledge.
5.
Ansell-PearsonK (2017) Deleuze’s new materialism: Naturalism, norms, and ethics. In: EllenzweigSZammitoJH (eds) The New Politics of Materialism: History, Philosophy, Science. London and New York: Routledge, 88–109.
6.
ApostolidouSSturmJ (2016) Weighing posthumanism: Fatness and contested humanity. Social Inclusion4(4): 150–159.
7.
AroraSVan DyckB (2021) Refusal as radical care? Moving beyond modern industrial agriculture. Development64: 252–258.
8.
BacchiCBeasleyC (2004) Moving beyond care and/or trust: An ethic of social flesh. Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, September/October.
9.
BacchiCBeasleyC (2005) Biotechnology and the political Limits of ‘care’. In Shildrick M and Mykitiuk R (eds) Rethinking Feminist Bioethics: The Challenge of the Postmodern. New York: MIT Press, 175–194.
10.
BakkerI (2007) Social reproduction and the constitution of a gendered political economy. New Political Economy12(4): 541–556.
11.
BaldassarLMerlaL (Eds) (2013) Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding Mobility and Absence in Family Life. London and New York: Routledge.
12.
BaradK (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs28(3): 801–831.
13.
BaradK (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.
14.
BarkerDKFeinerSF (2010) As the world turns: Globalization, consumption, and the feminization of work. Rethinking Marxism22(2): 246–252.
15.
BarnesM (2012) Care in Everyday Life: An Ethic of Care in Practice. Chicago: Policy Press.
16.
BarrettMMcIntoshM (1982) The Anti-Social Family. London: Verso.
17.
BayneS (2018) Posthumanism: A navigation aid for educators. On education. Journal for Research and Debate1(2): 1–7.
18.
BeasleyC (1992) The Sexual Metaphysics of Economics: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, Post-Marxism, Marxism and ‘materialist’ Feminisms. PhD thesis, Flinders University, South Australia.
19.
BeasleyC (1994) Sexual Economyths: Conceiving a Feminist Economics. Singapore: St. Martin's Press.
20.
BeasleyC (1996) Charting an/other direction?: Sexual economyths and suggestions for a feminist economics. Australian Feminist Studies11(1): 99–113.
21.
BeasleyC (2005) Gender and Sexuality: Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
22.
BeasleyC (2017) Beyond care and vocabularies of altruism. In Harding R, Fletcher R and Beasley C (eds) ReValuing Care in Theory, Law and Policy: Cycles and Connections. Abingdon: Routledge. Abingdon: Routledge, 233–247.
23.
BeasleyC (2023) Embrace or engagement? Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) and feminist posthumanism/new materialism. In Mellström U and Pease B (eds) Beyond Anthropocentric Masculinities: Posthumanism, New Materialism and the Man Question. Abingdon Park and. Abingdon Park and New York: Routledge, 137–153.
24.
BeasleyCBacchiC (2005) The political limits of ‘care’ in reimagining interconnection/community and an ethical future. Australian Feminist Studies20(46): 49–64.
25.
BeasleyCBacchiC (2007) Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity towards an ethic of social flesh. Feminist Theory8(3): 279–298.
26.
BeasleyCHolmesM (2021) Internet Dating: Intimacy and Social Change. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.
27.
BedfordKRaiSM (2010) Feminists theorize international political economy. Signs36(1): 1–18.
28.
BennettJ (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.
29.
BorgersonJ (2001) Feminist ethical ontology: Contesting ‘the bare givenness of intersubjectivity’. Feminist Theory2(2): 173–187.
30.
BraidottiR (2011) Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York: Columbia University Press.
31.
BrattonB (2021) The revenge of the real: Politics for a post-pandemic world. London and New York: Verso.
32.
BurkeA (2000) S=strangers without strangeness: Ethics and difference between Australia and the new Indonesian order. Communal/Plural8(2): 141–159.
33.
ChatzidakisAHakimJLittlerJ, et al. (2020) From carewashing to radical care: The discursive explosions of care during COVID-19. Feminist Media Studies20(6): 889–895.
34.
CiforM (2017) Stains and remains: Liveliness, materiality, and the archival lives of queer bodies. Australian Feminist Studies32(91–92): 5–21.
35.
Clark-KazakC (2023) Why care now’ in forced migration research? Imagining a radical feminist ethics of care. ACME22(4): 1151–1173.
36.
CohenD (2024) IBM changed history, then couldn’t keep up. The Australian Financial Review, Friday 23, February, Review section, 1R and 6R.
37.
CooleDFrostS (Eds) (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
38.
CooperD (2007) Well, you go there to get off’ visiting feminist care ethics through a women’s bathhouse. Feminist Theory8(3): 243–262.
39.
CooperD (2016) Transformative state publics. New Political Science38(3): 315–334.
40.
CooperD (2022) Afterword. In: MonticelliL (eds) The Future is Now: An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 230–241.
41.
Dalla CostaM (1972) Women and the subversion of community. In Dalla Costa M and James S The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol, UK, Falling Wall Press: 21–56.
42.
DeLandaM (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
43.
DeleuzeGGuattariF (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B Massumi. London: Athlone Press.
44.
DelphyC (1984) Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. London: Hutchinson.
45.
DerridaJ (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge.
46.
DiproseR (2000) What is (feminist) philosophy?Hypatia15(2): 115–132.
47.
DiproseR (2012) Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas. New York: State University of New York Press.
48.
DolphijnRvan der TuinI (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
49.
DrakopoulouM (2000) The ethic of care, female subjectivity and feminist legal scholarship. Feminist Legal Studies8: 199–226.
EngelmannS (2019) Kindred spirits: Learning to love nature the posthuman way. Journal of Philosophy of Education53(3): 503–517.
52.
EnglandPBudigMFolbreN (2002) Wages of virtue: The relative pay of care work. Social Problems49(4): 455–473.
53.
EngsterD (2004) Care ethics and natural law theory: Toward an institutional political theory of caring. The Journal of Politics66(1): 113–135.
54.
FedericiS (1975) Wages Against Housework. Bristol, UK: Falling Wall Press.
55.
FlaxJ (1995) Keynote address, Australasian political studies association annual conference, cited in C Johnson (1997) ‘Visiting the Margins’. Theory and Event1(3). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32471.
56.
FolbreN (1994) Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint. London and New York: Routledge.
GrahamH (1991) The concept of caring in feminist research. The case of domestic service. Sociology25(1): 61–78.
66.
GramsciA (1994) Letters from Prison. 2 vols. Rosengarten F (ed); trans. Rosenthal R. New York: Columbia University Press.
67.
GrummellBDevineDLynchK (2009) The care-less manager: Gender, care and new managerialism in higher education. Gender and Education21(2): 191–208.
68.
GunaratnamYLewisG (2001) Racialising emotional labour and emotionalising racialised labour: Anger, fear and shame in social welfare. Journal of Social Work Practice15(2): 131–148.
69.
GunewS (1990) Feminist knowledge: Critique and construct. In: GunewS (eds) Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct. London and New York: Routledge, 13–35.
70.
Gutierrez RodriguezE (2013) The precarity of feminisation. International Journal of Politics27(2): 191–202.
71.
HeldV (1993) Feminist Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
72.
HobartHIJKKneeseT (2020) Radical care: Survival strategies for uncertain times. Social Text38(1): 1–16.
73.
HochschildAR (1989) The Second Shift. New York: Avon.
74.
HochschildAR (2000) Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In: HuttonWGiddensA (eds) On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 130–146.
75.
HoerderDvan NederveenENeunsingerS (Eds) (2015) Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers. Leiden: Brill.
76.
hooksb (1999) All about Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.
77.
HughesBMcKieLHopkinsD, et al. (2005) Love’s labours lost? Feminism, the disabled people’s movement and an ethic of care. Sociology39(2): 259–275.
78.
HunekeSC (2021, June 2) “Do not ask me who I am”: Foucault and neoliberalism. The Point. Retrieved May 2022, from thepointmag.com/politics/do-not-ask-me-who-I-am/
79.
HunterS (2021) Decolonizing white care: Relational reckoning with the violence of coloniality in welfare. Ethics and Social Welfare15(4): 344–362.
80.
JackD (2021) Bare life and health terror: Giorgio Agamben on the politics of the pandemic. Australian Book Review436: 40–43.
81.
JamiesonL (2005) Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
82.
KeyCBrowneFTaylorN, et al. (2021) Proceed with care: Reimagining home Iot through a care perspective. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445602.
LuxtonM (1997) The UN, women and household labour. Measuring and valuing unpaid work. Women’s Studies International Forum20(May/June): 431–439.
89.
LynchKBakerJLyonsM (2009) Affective Equality: Who Cares? Studies in Gender, Care and Justice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
90.
MackenzieC (2015) Responding to the agency dilemma: Autonomy, adaptive preferences, and internalized oppression. In: OshanaM (eds) Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression. New York: Routledge, 48–67.
91.
MackenzieCStoljarN (eds) (2000) Relational Autonomy Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press.
92.
MahonRRobinsonF (2011) Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press.
93.
McGeeM (2020) Capitalism’s care problem: Some traces, fixes, and patches. Social Text38(1): 39–66.
94.
MeillassouxQ (2010) After Finitude: An Essay on The Necessity of Contingency(Brassier R Trans.). London and New York: Continuum.
95.
MellorM (1997) Women, nature and the social construction of ‘economic man’. Ecological Economics20(2): 129–140.
96.
MerchantC (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco, CA and London: Harper.
97.
MinowM (1990) Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion and American Law. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
98.
NedelskyJ (2012) Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
99.
NoddingsN (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press.
100.
ParpartJLZalewskiM (Eds) (2013) Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations. London and New York: Zed Book.
101.
Perkins GilmanC (1898) Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston, MA: Small, Maynard & Co.
102.
PlumwoodV (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.
SallehA (1997) Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books.
111.
SandilandsC (1999) The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and The Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
112.
SevenhuijsenS (1998) Too good to be true?: Feminist considerations about trust and social cohesion. IWM Working Paper No 3. Vienna: Institute for Human Studies.
113.
SevenhuijsenS (2003) The place of care: The relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social policy. Feminist Theory4(2): 179–197.
114.
ShakespeareT (2000) The social relations of care. In: LewisGGewirizSClarkeJ (eds) Rethinking Social Policy. London: Open University, 52–65.
115.
StephensE (2014) Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity. (espace.library.uq.edu.au).
116.
StewartA (2007) Who do we care about? Reflections on gender justice in a global market. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly58(3): 358–374.
117.
SullivanN (2012) The somatechnics of perception and the matter of the non/human: A critical response to the new materialism. European Journal of Women’s Studies19(3): 299–313.
118.
The Care Collective (2020) The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.
119.
TongR (1993) Feminine and Feminist Ethics. Belmont, California: Wadsworth.
120.
TrontoJC (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.
121.
TrontoJC (2015) Who cares? How to reshape a democratic politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
122.
WaringM (1999 [1988]) Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
123.
WarrenK (2000) Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
124.
WilliamsFGavanasA (2008) The intersection of childcare regimes and migration regimes: A three-country study. In: LutzH (eds) Migration and Domestic Work. A European Perspective on a Global Theme. Farnham: Ashgate, 13–28.
125.
WyschogrodE (2003) Towards a postmodern ethics: Corporeality and alterity. In: WyschogrodEMcKennyGP (eds) The Ethical. Oxford: Blackwell, 54–65.
126.
YoungIM (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
127.
ZizzoGWarinMZivkovicT, et al. (2021) Productive exposures: Vulnerability as a parallel practice of care in ethnographic and community spaces. The Australian Journal of Anthropology32(2): 150–165.
